midnight musings
by orpheus-under-starlight
Summary: Night makes our demons taller.


Edea's strength is not born of the steel she holds in her hands.

How few are they who realize this. Edea started without the ghosts that they did, true, but with every new cycle...

Sometimes, in the middle of the night, she squints through the darkness and watches her hands tremble. Fancies that she can see the blood on them. Wonders at the tears that do not come.

It is something to kill those whom you have loved for a lifetime. It is another thing entirely to do so again... and again... and again, repeat ad infinitum. But Edea can see the way her three friends smile when she misses something because she's never had to bury a family member (and she can see the shadows in their eyes when she's being a pain in the ass—or the shadows that are always in Airy's eyes, because everyone is a pain in the ass—). At first they value that innocence.

So (and it starts as a desire to help) Edea pretends. Edea smiles and lets loose witty zingers in Ringabel's direction; Edea describes food in lush detail and enjoys it almost as much. Edea supports Agnés and teaches Tiz. Edea's blade dances with her fancy footwork and buries itself in the sides of her enemies, its song ending in a wet and brutal squelch that never leaves her mind. Not once. Not before she takes it out, glistening with red, and not after she wipes it on the grass with nary a change in expression.

And certainly not when the night closes in around her stuffy little cabin on Grandship. It is there, funnily enough, that the demons make their home. They carve out enclaves in the knotted wood of the wall and creep under her bed and it's only when she realizes she's kept a candle burning three nights in a row that she knows:

She will never be free of these monsters.

Demons can be pummeled, ghosts can be destroyed by life energy, plants can be decimated by flames, but the voices that whisper of sins and sacrifices and cost are not so easily silenced. All the world could be righted and Airy defeated and she reconciled with her father and still the silence of the night will haunt her.

The guilt alone would be enough to drive normal men mad, she thinks in a rare moment of wry honesty. (But she's not normal, is she? She's Edea Lee. Daughter of Braev. Daughter of the grand marshal. Daughter, in a way, of Eternia. Heiress to all its blizzards.)

(Her father, with his own two hands, taught her how to live with making sacrifices—to destroy him, if need be. Never did they dream that in one world, she actually would.)

She sits up in the darkness, fists clenched, jaw set. It's a strange sort of thing to be at once furious with yourself for thinking depressing thoughts and half-convinced that your every condemnation is truth, but Edea's had quite enough of it. It had to be done, she insists. There was no other way. He wouldn't listen—

The words ring empty. So terribly, damningly empty... and once again, Edea is left to hear the whispers.

 _There was another way. There was a way. You didn't want to listen, either. You wouldn't listen. Not to Einheria and not to the man that held you in his arms when you were a newborn and promised to forge a world for you where flowers could bloom without fear of being crushed and children could play in the streets without their mothers hurrying them back inside. A world where you would only become a member of the Eternian Sky Knights if you wanted to be one._

 _You have betrayed your kin, Edea. You have betrayed your comrades. You are a deserter and a fool—_

"I know that," she hisses at the wall, but it comes out hollow. "But there _wasn't_ another way. Nothing I could have known. And I don't have time for you."

That, at least, is true enough.

Two rooms down, a door shuts. Her head snaps up. The footsteps on the planks are light and cautious, avoiding all the creaky boards with experienced ease. They pause at her door for the slightest of moments before moving on.

Ringabel again. Restless because of the repairs. Edea sighs.

He is dreaming, she knows, of a world where an Alternis-that-was came too late. Even though that will not happen here in _this_ world, he's still dealing with the fallout.

Much like her, really. These sorts of things tend to take their time.

But something in her heart protests violently at the thought of Ringabel (the moron) sitting out on the deck, alone again.

Because she is Edea, she rises and goes to keep him company. Whatever she is—be it traitor, fool, traumatized teenage girl, one of Agnés' protectors, or perhaps even something just and righteous—it'll all have to wait.

She's got someone to keep out of his own head for a little while.


End file.
